The MOO Blog

I don’t know about you, but I often look down after I’ve finished my coffee only to be disappointed. It’s just plain white ceramic… where are the monsters? Where’s the chaos?!

Don Moyer felt the same way. That’s why he started designing plates and mugs for the brand Calamityware. After 9 successful Kickstarter campaigns for a variety of plate designs, his 10th is slightly different: the humble mug.

We are only days away from The Dots’s Advertising Portfolio Masterclass an event in which fledgling creatives can get their portfolios reviewed by 10 creative industry leaders, including Caroline Pay, Deputy Executive Creative Director & Managing Partner, BBH London. Caroline has worked across brands including Levi’s, Cadbury’s, Schweppes, Dr Pepper, Honda and Coca Cola. Over recent years she has run New Look, The Post Office, The GREAT Britain Campaign, Boots and now Refuge, Tesco and BBC. We were lucky enough to get a window in Caroline’s very busy diary and we used it to get the lowdown on what she thinks makes a creative advertising portfolio great.

It’s safe to say many of us want to switch off a little more. We see this in the increasing amount of people practicing mindfulness, or going on ‘off the grid’ holidays – not to mention those strange people you see on the train who aren’t even on their phones.

The world’s had a taste of technology and there’s no stopping us now. Day after day we scour the Internet looking for the next big life-changing thing – sometimes getting distracted by the most off-piste use of quotation marks…

If you’ve ever thought you’d picked the perfect gift for a loved one, only to find out that they didn’t really need a chocolate teapot… this site may just be for you.

AskHerFriends aims to eliminate this issue by offering a carefully curated selection of goods for your partner. It all started, similar to above, when Ben bought his (ex) girlfriend a worm farm for her birthday. We grabbed co-founder Ben Blomerly to find out what it’s all about.

It’s often said that your website is like the shop window into your business, and just like you design your shop to offer a comfortable space and great experience, the same applies to your online visitors too. Creating a delightful environment online means that people will enjoy the time they spend on your website and ensure they keep coming back. That’s what our lead UX designer, Keri Lambden, does for us and wants you to do it too.

One of those is Keri Lambden, an Experience Designer at MOO. We picked her brains about what it is she does, and why it’s important to delight online.

At MOO, we champion design and love discovering great ideas, so we teamed up with The 9th annual Independent Handbag Designer Awards to sponsor the “Stand Out & Look Great Work Bag” category and help them find the next great accessory designer. We were looking for a unisex design that fulfilled both style and function—and had a little fun along the way. We received nearly five hundred submissions, but the winner was ultimately chosen by you lovely lot on MOO’s social media channels, along with select members of MOO’s design and creative teams. You can watch Jennifer’s amazing nomination film here.

Earlier this week the MOO crew were treated to a bookbinding workshop by arguably THE master of all things paper, Douglas Bevans.

The workshop took place at our London HQ and 20 lucky members of staff spent 2.5 hours turning paper (kindly donated by GF Smith), glue and thread into their very own A5 coptic-bound notebooks. They learnt all about paper grains, paper weights, knotting, sewing and had a lot of fun along the way.

We received lots of responses to the brief, which was simply to transform paper into something new. Boy did you guys flex your creative muscles. Fresh from working with us at last month’s SCOPE event in Basel, curator extraordinaire A. Moret reviewed the entries and selected the winners.

Are you the lonely solopreneur, tucked away in the basement of your (mama’s) house, reading MOO articles to stimulate your business acumen? Maybe you should consider getting out there, sitting yourself down at a desk surrounded by other like-minded individuals, occasionally discussing the nuances of retweets.

That’s the environment that WeWork have built. Self-defined as a “platform to support and promote creators and creative enterprise,” they deal with all the boring bits of property management so you only have to play a flat-fee and as a result of your payment, you don’t have to deal with your landlord ‘Crazy Colin.’

Summer is knocking on the door, and guess what? It’s holding a bunch of flowers, just for you. We quite like the idea of a personified season, darting from door to door to drop you off a little beautiful bouquet…

But what about if you’re not in? You’re in the back garden, darning silk-socks, listening to Santana and sipping on gin and juice. So the doorbell rings and rings, and the dejected harbinger of floral goodness leaves to find a more receptive audience.

Undoubtedly this has happened to you. Sobbing over a ‘sorry we missed you!’ placard lay coldly on your laminate flooring. So what if you could simply post your bouquet of flowers through the letterbox? That’s what Bloom & Wild have developed, and what’s inside the aforementioned box is even better.

I popped along to their Chelsea office to speak with co-founder Aron Gelbard, to see how they grew from grass roots to great heights.

Think back to the last time you received a postcard. Chances are it was a while ago, and it was from a close friend who’d jet off somewhere fancy in the Mediterranean… let’s be honest it was more gloat-card than postcard. The limited space positively burdens your chosen words with a greater weight, the total opposite of the uniform smatterings of the ‘lmaos’ and ‘rofls’ of today’s texters.

Paulo Magalhães of Portugal set up Postcrossing just under 10 years ago, and it’s gone from strength to strength. In fact, they’ve been going so strong that they’ve just recently surpassed the 30 million-postcard milestone. If you’ve not heard of them, the basic idea is to send cards around the world to random people and get talking; find out about their culture, history and hobbies.

I called up Postcrossing’s Director, Paulo Magalhães, along with their Community Manager, Ana Campos, to learn a bit more about their unprecedented postal platform.

Since landing back in 2010, Instagram has taken the world by storm and with over 300 million users, it is now bigger than Twitter. And that is big news for your brand. The look and feel of your feed helps define how your followers perceive your business and ultimately whether or not they’ll engage with your brand. Being an iInstagrammer isn’t just about throwing a filter on it; it’s about balancing the types of images you post, their composition and consistency.

So, step away from the selfie stick and read our advice on the seven posts that will make you big on Instagram.

What if there was a place you could go to talk through all your business startup problems? Meet SuccessLab, the brilliant support-group-for-startups idea you can model in your own city.

It all started in downtown Phoenix where Beth Cochran wanted to build up her PR marketing firm, Wired PR, and decided to find a business coach. Because let’s face it, working for yourself can also mean working in solitude. Where else do you go to talk through your experiences and desperations? No place, really. So business coach it is. After a while, Beth started to feel like the cost outweighed the benefits.

Careful craftsmanship, thoughtful branding and overall attention to aesthetic detail have made the high-end, custom men’s jeans from Noble Denim a hit in the Midwest…and beyond. We caught up with the entrepreneurial couple, Abby and Chris Sutton, to get their story, learn how they’ve managed to rise to the top of the pile and glean their best advice on self-promotion.

So you’re having dinner with the neighbors and you happen to mention you need a web designer. They tell you their son is really into web stuff lately — he’s been taking a class at his high school. Maybe he could help.

Your roll your fingers around your chin for a moment. Oh, the temptation. He’d be cheap. He might even do it in trade for some of those yummy lemon-squares your wife brought to the block party last spring.

Unless you’ve been hiding away in fear of vacuum cleaners, you’ll know that today is Bring Your Dog to Work Day! Whether you’re a thug with a pug, cabin crew with a shih tzu or a boxer with a… boxer, make sure to take your furry pal along to work with you (and maybe a carrier bag or two).

On Friday 12th June, 600 members of the design community descended on the Royal Geographical Society’s headquarters in London for Here 2015, an annual one-day symposium curated by It’s Nice That and dedicated to all things creative. Never one to miss a good design event – we get terrible FOMO – we slipped on our Nike internationals, made sure our iPhones were fully charged and headed down there.

Our very own Lisa Gralnek is a whiz when it comes to brand marketing. With experience for miles, she wowed us a couple weeks ago at Design Museum Boston’s morning speaker series. Get the full talk here:

We already know that you’re a stylish bunch, but now we want to see how stylish your business cards are too… As part of our ongoing partnership with The School of Style, we’re giving you the chance to win yourself some cool prizes by sharing photos of your fashionable MOO cards via Instagram.

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